Abortion legal equals less crime?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I have to drive an hour and a half 3X a week so I rent books on tape. Today I started listening to Freekonomics. I must be out of it but I’d never heard of this book, but ordered it because it looked engaging. I listened to the first part of it today and it is fascinating. One of the first questions he answers is: Why has the crime rate decreased every year for the past ten years despite predictions that it would reach crisis proportions at this point?

Various “experts” postulated: better gun control, more police, etc.

But his answer made sense and was something I never would have thought of: 20 years ago the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion and since the majority of aborted babies are from low-income mothers, the group most likely to produce criminals, the group of people from which a lot of potential criminals come had been drastically reduced. I found this statistic: 57% of women who obtain abortions have family incomes under 200% of the poverty line. Low-income women are three times more likely to have abortions than those who are financially better off.

Here’s a link to the book: http://www.freakonomics.com/

I am just totally taken aback by what appears to be a logical explanation. It m akes sense. I suppose this answer could cause plenty of people to react, but the author says that he just bases his answers on lots of data.

I don’t know if he’s right, but he sure is interesting.

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http://www.isteve.com/abortion.htm

3

This guy seems fairly ridiculous on the face of it. His contention is that because births out of wedlock continued to rise, that “unwanted births” are also on the rise. This contradicts most of what I’ve heard, that unwed births are on the rise with older women who want children. He also gets into some semantical mumbo-jumbo with the terms “unwanted pregnancy” versus “unwanted birth”. If you don’t want to be pregnant than obviously you don’t want to give birth.

Interesting that Steve Sailer agrees with the parts of Leavitt’s book where it matches his social agenda.

It’s also clear that, as a conservative pundit, the guy has an agenda. I’d much prefer an academic (unbiased) refutation, if one exists.

4

Yeah - Levitt has a fairly solid academic reputation, and is highly regarded by many, particularly for his novel experiment design. If there are holes in his theory I’m sure they will have been pointed out by people who have less of an axe to grind.